Monday, January 07, 2013

Israeli Children’s Trauma Ignored by Washington Post

The Washington Post has published a story examining the trauma suffered by Gazan children as a result of conflict. The scene is set with a vivid and emotive opening:

Fatima still dreams about Ahmed.
Sometimes they’re playing with toys as they used to do. But in other
dreams, she’s looking over the edge of the balcony at her brother’s
smashed and bloodied body, his pink brain spilling from his skull, her
father screaming through his tears.

Ahmed was 7 when he was killed by
an Israeli airstrike during the 2008 Israeli invasion of Gaza. Fatima
was 8 at the time — but that was “old enough to remember,” said her
father, Osama Mohamed Qurtan.

And herein lies the fundamental problem with the story – the
description of an Israeli “invasion” paints a picture of Gazan children
suffering as a result of Israeli malevolence. Indeed, later in the
article is the following:

Gaza was attacked, they say, for
the same reason Israel struck in 2008 — to kill Palestinians and seize
more Palestinian land. (Israel says its warplanes carry out precision
strikes on carefully identified terrorist targets.)

A short sentence in parentheses is all that Israel’s narrative
warrants according to the Washington Post. This article could not be any
more one-sided. Nowhere is there any reference to the thousands of
rockets fired at Israeli targets from Gaza. While the writer refers to
Gaza experiencing two wars in four years, what about Sderot and the
surrounding areas of southern Israel that have experienced barely a day
of quiet during the past decade? Israeli children have been brought up
experiencing almost daily alerts that give them some 15 seconds to take
cover or run for a bomb shelter.

While the trauma of Syrian children
has featured in the Washington Post, it seems that Israeli children
just don’t suffer. Is this because fewer Israeli children have died than
Palestinian children? This reduces the story to one based purely on
unequal body counts and ignores the bigger picture.
Nobody disputes that Gaza’s children have suffered as a result of
conflict. But resorting to the knee-jerk “blame Israel” routine
completely ignores reality. A reality where Palestinian children are
exposed to danger as a direct result of terrorists operating from within
civilian areas turning children into human shields. A reality where
Israel makes supreme efforts to avoid causing harm to Palestinian
civilians while Palestinian terrorists do their utmost to
indiscriminately kill and maim innocent Israelis.

Indeed, following much of the mainstream media, the Washington Post
exhibits the familiar tendency to absolve Palestinians of any
responsibility for their situation. In this framing of the story,
Palestinians can only be victims and are never capable of affecting
their own circumstances.
But you wouldn’t know this from the Washington Post where Israel is
responsible for the trauma of Palestinian children while the trauma of
Israeli children doesn’t even register.